{"doi":"10.1111/1475-6773.14637","title":"Ten Healthcare Delivery Trends and Their Measurement and Methodological Implications for Cancer Health Services Research","abstract":"The future of healthcare delivery across the cancer continuum holds great promise and challenge. U.S. cancer mortality across all cancers combined decreased ~2% annually from 2015 to 2019 thanks to a range of factors including clinical and delivery innovations in cancer prevention, control, treatment, supportive care, and efforts to improve clinical trial access [1]. However, long-standing cancer health disparities remain. Accelerated progress is vital to reduce cancer deaths for all Americans and achieve National Cancer Plan goals [2-4]. Additionally, COVID-19 impacts on cancer are still emerging [5, 6] and the long-term cancer survivor population is growing—increasing sustained surveillance for recurrence, new cancers, late effects, and other long-term health concerns [7]. These and other individual, institutional, and societal trends are shaping cancer care delivery, treatment, and research. Cancer health services research has a role in tracking and understanding how such trends influence health service design, delivery, and outcomes, to inform care approaches, health system decisions, and policy innovation across the cancer continuum. Such trends also beg the question, what measurement and methodological innovations are needed for timely, valid evaluation of their impact on cancer-related health services and outcomes important to patients, caregivers, healthcare professionals, payers, and policy makers? Continued measurement and methodological development only stand to improve scientific quality, reproducibility, and practical impact. Therefore, in this commentary, we briefly summarize 10 trends in cancer care delivery, treatment, and research and explore potential implications for health services research measurement and methods. Our intent is not to comprehensively address all possible opportunities or ideas presented here, but to highlight pressing, foundational needs and promising directions for measurement and methods focused science. Our focus is cancer health services research. However, the challenges and opportunities discussed clearly have broader implications. Rededication to strengthening our research methods and measures is an investment in the foundational T0 basic science [8] of cancer health services research and, therefore, essential to generating and translating future evidence into practice and policy. A universe of trends influences health services at-large at any given moment, however, we highlight 10 trends elevating the necessity of methods and measures research in cancer-focused health services research, including: (1) precision oncology; (2) whole-person perspectives; (3) health technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence (AI), mobile health, telehealth); (4) expanding in-home and community-based services; (5) health system integration and efforts addressing care fragmentation; (6) workforce capacity and evolving roles; (7) population aging; (8) improving safety, quality, value and access while controlling costs and addressing financial toxicity; (9) addressing social drivers of health; and (10) leveraging data oceans with unstructured, semi-structured, and structured elements. Deep discussion of each is beyond our scope, but we discuss several of these trends with examples and then give focused attention to measurement and methodological implications. One trend with significant measurement and methodological implications is the rapid advancement of precision oncology paradigms. Precision paradigms are fundamentally changing the understanding of cancer risk, diagnosis, disease profiling, treatment monitoring, therapeutic development, trial eligibility, and have birthed new health services (e.g., genetic counseling, in-house molecular pathology) [9-11]. Precision approaches highlight potential pitfalls of analyses by organ site (e.g., lung, breast) that lump together variations in genetic or social risks, different genomic signatures, treatments, and implications for prognosis and quality of life (QO","journal":"Health Services Research","year":2025,"id":565224,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9515,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":234765,"name":"Sandra A. Mitchell","orcid":"0000-0002-4153-9972","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":468861,"name":"Sallie J. Weaver","orcid":"0000-0002-5859-7669","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":143,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:56:28.709936Z","pmid":"40312893","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}